Developing Healthy Attraction

Beauty is a double edged sword. I grew up thinking that beauty is pain. People find beauty in horror, and drama. I see beauty most clearly in the natural world. My struggle in finding my beauty, namely through anorexia, is in itself beautiful, and horrific. I grew up in a home where thin was beautiful. My mother was a ballerina in childhood and still struggles with her eating disorder. We both need to have control over our beauty, and we find that through limiting our calorie intake to the extreme. This started when I was a young child. My mother has major depressive disorder and had every intention to cook for us, but sometimes in the summer we would go days without a meal. This made me so grateful and appreciative if the food I did get, that every meal my mother made was beautiful. The first time I heard that beauty hurts I felt it in my core. This has been my struggle.

I feel that beauty and pain are interrelated in many ways, but it was clearly layed out in childhood for me. Then there is the struggle to have beautiful skin, hair, and for men, handsome bank accounts and cars. A lot of what we seem to define as beautiful seems superficial. I am learning to find beauty in what shows up in my scope of reality and recognize it as such. The gentle wave of my red hair. The glisten of my leg hair in the sun. The snailshell I found on a walk today. The vibrant yellows of the flowers. The caring nature of my aunt. The music I play with my cousin. I even find it beautiful that my uncle cannot sit still. I am learning to find the innate beauty of each individual who is not me, my surroundings, and myself. What I am getting at, is the journey from worshipping a grotesque idea of beauty to subtly finding it in everything I see and am and do has been beautiful. The beauty is related to the struggle, but the success is seeing that beauty doesn't have to be painful or hard.